Beans and Roses
Everyday Economies and Morality in Contemporary Havana, Cuba Maria Padrón Hernández
University of Gothenburg 2012
© Maria Padrón Hernández 2012 Tryck: Ale Tryckteam AB, Bohus 2012 ISBN: 978-91-628-8477-2
...
1 Introduction 1
Morality and economy ... 4
Binary Socialism ... 6
Fieldwork ... 13
Outline of the thesis ... 17
... 2 Setting the Scene 19 Historical Overview ... 23
The Segmented Market ... 26
The Labor Market ... 42
Equality and Inequality ... 45
Families and Households ... 49
Recent Changes ... 58
... 3 Evaluating Living Standard 61 Living Standard and Poverty ... 62
Economic Stress ... 67
Refusing to be Content with the Basic ... 71
Refusing Poverty ... 75
... 4 Expectations and Differences in Everyday Consumption 81 Negotiating Rights and Obligations in the State Markets ... 86
Trust and Moral Negotiations in the Informal Market ... 90
Creating Difference in the Dual Economy ... 94
... 5 Earning a Living 105 State Salaries and the Cost of Living ... 108
Incentives to Work ... 112
Diversification and Assets ... 118
Employment as an Asset ... 121
Formal versus Informal Work ... 128
Employment as a Source of Status ... 135
Inventar ... 139
... 6 Interest and Affect 145 Rights and Obligations: Negotiating Kinship and Economy ... 149
Disinterestedness and Calculation: Negotiating Intentions ... 155
Morality, Economy and Relations ... 162
... 7 Conclusions 165 Sammanfattning ... 171
Appendix... 177
Appendix 1: Special monthly rations ... 177
Appendix 2: Form for collecting household budgets ... 178
Acknowledgements
Estoy eternamente agradecida a todas las personas que han compartido sus vidas conmigo en La Habana. Ha sido un privilegio y un placer. Un agradecimiento especial a Robertico que me ayudó tanto con las planillas y con todo lo demás.
A special thanks to my supervisors Kaj Århem and Mona Rosendahl. Thank you Kaj for teaching me the value of ethnography and descriptions so thick you can smell the smells (though I’m not sure that I’ve lived up to that ideal…). Thank you Mona for believing in me long before I gave you reason to do so, for always being so genuinely interested in this project, and for sharing your profound knowledge of Cuba (and of Bourdieu) with me. Working with two so experienced and generous anthropologists has been an honor. Marita Eastmond stepped in as a temporary supervisor during a crucial step in the beginning and I want to thank her here.
Another huge thank you to Silje Lundgren. Walking down this path has been much more pleasant (read: less gruesome) with you walking next to me. My best methodological tips to anyone writing a dissertation is: 1) do fieldwork at the same time as someone who is not only an incredibly talented anthropologist but also a wonderful friend; 2) keep that person by your side to share both the professional and the personal. THANK YOU!
A big thank you to my colleague Karin Ekström for so many things: reading and commenting on this text, being my emotional waste-basket in all matters related to Academia, being a good friend (and the best roommate ever!) and always keeping me on my toes politically.
Besides Silje and Karin other colleagues I want to thank for reading and commenting on parts of this text are Lisa Åkesson, Nina Gren, Johan Wedel and Kerstin Sundman: thank you all. Thank you also to Nadine Fernandez for being my opponent at the trial dissertation. An extra special thank you to Brooke Churchman for language editing. Mentioning all the people that have been good colleagues at SGS would make this acknowledgement too long but you know
who you are! Thank you also to the technical and administrative staff at SGS – without you no research could ever be conducted.
Annika Einarsson deserves a special mention for not only providing me with a place to stay in Gothenburg when I had none but also for making me a total addict of the sublime literary genre of urban fantasy. Without a high level of escapism during the writing of this dissertation my brain would have exploded years ago…
Research for this dissertation was funded by Sida/SAREC (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Department for Research Cooperation. Project number SWE-2005-267). Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse, Lars Hiertas Minnesfond and Gad Rausings Siftelse also provided necessary travel grants. Thank you for your generosity.
Quiero terminar por darle las gracias a mi familia. A mi suegra por enseñarme tantas cosas sobre Cuba y sobre la vida. A mi suegro por recibirnos e incluirnos en familia. A mis padres por todo y en específico por ayudarnos con Gabriel. Si escribir una tesis, estudiar y ser padres es complicado se vuelve aún más complicado cuando el niño se niega a ir a la guardería. Gracias a ‘El Lolo’ por cuidar a Gabriel para que yo pudiera escribir y Ale pudiera estudiar. Es una deuda que nunca podré pagar. Gracias también a ‘La Lola’ por ayudarnos de tantas formas que no se ni por dónde empezar. Gracias también a Ale por apoyarme en todo, por ser un verdadero compañero y por tener conmigo esta constante conversación que es un matrimonio. Gabriel, no puedo decir que me hayas ayudado mucho en escribir esto – más bien me has dejado ver que no es gran cosa (GRACIAS!). Te lo dedico a tí, neni.
1
Introduction
The woman at the only cash register in the small hard-currency1 food store suddenly hits
the wrong button and has to go and get someone with the knowledge and authorization to fix the problem. The queue stops moving completely and a store employee takes position at the door to prevent further shoppers from crowding the small room.
The mood instantly turns to unhappy and resigned. There are deep sighs as people put their groceries on close-by shelves (shopping carts are seldom used as people shop for small quantities of goods and often just hold them in their hands) and stand in more relaxed poses, preparing to wait. Someone goes to get something they just remembered they need. Someone else returns something they really cannot afford. People start looking at each other’s groceries, ask about prices and maybe decide to swap chicken thighs for ground meat…
As usual I just try to disconnect and not participate. I’m so fed up with these things that happen all the time here that my only strategy for maintaining my mental health is to engage in some sort of meditation. I turn off and try to distance myself from this place. Everything people do to interact with me is irritating. Not the best thing to do as an anthropologist in the field, I know.
The woman behind me starts talking, seemingly to nobody in particular:
“The kitchen really makes you go crazy! Yesterday I made chicken stew and got some of that good sauce left over. Now I’ll buy some hot dogs to go with the sauce. Yes! Because the kitchen really makes you go crazy! You can’t throw anything away. My husband sometimes sees a jar and says: ‘What’s this?’ And I tell him: ‘Leave that right there because I might use it tomorrow!’ …And the person who has no convertible cents has a really, really hard time. Very hard.”
1 During fieldwork in 2006 there were two currencies in Cuba: the Cuban Peso (MN) and the Convertible Peso
(CUC) with an exchange rate of 1CUC = 24 MN. CUC had hard currency value. For more about this see chapters two and four.
The young woman standing behind her in the queue giggles nervously: “My granny has to drink milk because of something with her stomach…I don’t really know what it is…And in the bodega2 they don’t give us any milk so we have to buy it in the [hard currency]
store. She cannot be without her milk”.
Another woman in the queue wonders aloud why they don’t plead medical reasons to get a special diet of rationed subsidized milk3 but never gets an answer. The woman
initiating the conversation in the first place just keeps up her monologue: “I still have the cents because my husband keeps working but when he retires I don’t know what we’ll do. The thing is everything is so expensive. Nobody seems to notice but salaries are so low and prices so high.”
Another woman decides to join in: “And the few cents that they raise the salaries with, they just take right back with the raised prices for food.”
Nobody seems to listen to her and the initial monologue keeps going: “Prices for the Panda4 TV-sets are a lack of respect! 4000 pesos? Luckily my husband got one from his
workplace because otherwise…”
The problem with the cash register is fixed and the queue starts moving again. The momentary community created by the forced waiting is over and we all pay for our goods and go home.
***
I laugh when I read this entry in my field diary now, almost five years after the events occurred. I laugh remembering my irritation and home sickness towards the end of my fieldwork, but principally I laugh because it illustrates so clearly that the issues I focus on in this dissertation, everyday economies and moral negotiations, were ever present during my time in the field. I might, at times, have tried to distance myself mentally, but these issues were everywhere and, at least for me, impossible to ignore. The mixture of irritation and curiosity that I felt also reminds me of how my interest in economic anthropology started.
2 Bodega = state store for rationed goods. More about this in chapter two and four.
3 As will be dealt with in chapter two one can get special rations for medical reasons. See appendix 1 for a list
of subsidized medical diets.
4 A Chinese brand of television which were assembled in Cuban factories. These televisions were part of the
As a university student in Havana in 2000, the thing that bothered me most was navigating the murky waters that flooded all situations where economy and interpersonal relations intersected. The insecurities and moral dilemmas in the informal market, the complex web of rights and obligations in households and families, the balance of friendship in the face of inequality, the subtleties of different forms of transactions - trading, giving, sharing, bartering - and their different meanings: charity, community, condescension, respect, gratitude, superiority, love, exploitation. I could go on. While my initial concern was my position as a wealthy foreigner in relation to Cubans (I remember having nightmares where my face was replaced with a dollar-sign) I quickly became less self-centered and started focusing on what I called, in my under-graduate thesis (Padrón Hernández, 2003) “the household economy”. Much has happened since then, but the seeds for the present research were planted then and there.
This dissertation primarily builds on anthropological fieldwork carried out in Havana over a period of eight months in 2006 – the same year Fidel Castro was announced too ill to continue as the Maximum Leader of the country. In retrospect then, it emerges as an image of the last months of an important phase of the Cuban revolutionary process: the time between the reforms implemented to deal with the economic crisis of the 1990s5 and the ones
being implemented at the time of writing by the new leader, Raúl Castro, in order to “rationalize” the state economy.
In this context of change, the overarching theme of this dissertation deals with how morality is articulated in economic life. The importance of this theme in conversations and interactions dealing with everyday economies in Havana is striking. How should one act in the informal economy? What happens when priorities have to be decided in the face of scarcity? What are the obligations of the state to its citizens? Or, for that matter, of a son towards his mother? Why is it shameful to express hunger? Is the T-shirt offered as a friendly gift, a condescending act of charity or a blatant admission of “ulterior motives”? What can be expected in life? What is just and fair and what is not?
The answers to these questions shed new light on much bigger issues: the negotiation of meaning and morality in the face of rapid change, and ultimately the question that has occupied theoretical writings in economic
anthropology for such a long time, the nature of human beings: are we primarily rational or moral, social or cultural?
The title I have chosen, “Beans and Roses”, is a play on words of the famous poem by James Oppenheimer, “Bread and Roses”, which deals with women’s struggle in labor unions in early twentieth century USA. Bread is a powerful symbol for food in Europe and the US, and the Cuban equivalent is beans (and rice). Oppenheimer’s phrase relates to my main theoretical point: economic aspects of life (beans) cannot be considered separately from other aspects (roses). But it also has to do with a personal political standpoint which, as will be developed in chapter three, my interlocutors helped me reach; when evaluating living standard or talking about poverty we should not limit ourselves to “basic needs” but must always take into consideration what is considered to be good in life. We should all be able to have both beans and roses.
Morality and economy
At least in its substantivist vein, economic anthropology evolved, in large part, as a critique of conventional economics. More specifically, the assumptions made in conventional economics that regard people as maximizing individuals have long been challenged by economic anthropology, which instead puts forward a view of individuals as primarily social, cultural and moral beings. Since Polanyi, economic anthropologists have shown, time and again, the “embeddedness” of economy and the impossibility of separating economy from culture and society.
As argued by anthropologists Richard Wilk and Lisa Cliggett, the study of “other” economies have, at least since Marcel Mauss, been used to formulate a critique of modern capitalism:
Anthropologists’ fascination with gifts and gift exchange is an attempt to argue with utilitarianism and to say that in other societies, goods are socially (Sahlins) or morally (Mauss) positive, but in capitalist societies commodities dehumanize people and reduce all social relations to markets and money. Gifts and gift economies are attractive because many people hope systems exist that are not purely self-interested and capital-based. (Wilk & Cliggett, 2007, pp. 171-172)
This point is, as we will see, especially important to have in mind in a study of socialist Cuba. The contrast of morality and economy put forth in the
above quote is, in fact, a central folk model in Western culture. Calculation, profit-seeking, selfishness, trade, commodities, modernity and capitalism are contrasted with feelings, solidarity, altruism, sharing, gifts, tradition and pre/non-capitalism. An abbreviation of this would be the contrast of money and love or, to use less value-laden terms, interest and affect. These contrasting pairs are not only seen as incompatible but also mutually corrupting. Personal feelings are, for example, as corrupting for business (nepotism!) as commoditization is for intimacy (prostitution!). Sociologist Viviana Zelizer (2005, p. 22) has called this the account of “separate spheres and hostile worlds”.
The notion of “separate spheres and hostile worlds” is not only fundamental for Western culture at large but has also shaped scholarly work and theory-making in studies of economy and society6. As expressed by Wilk and
Ciggett (2007, p. 190) it is extremely difficult to think outside powerful folk models like these. The normative, moral and political dimensions mentioned in the quote above further complicate the issue. Browne (2009, p. 9) writes:
As anthropologists with at least a generation of practice at exploding false dichotomies, we are surprisingly complicit with our binary regard of morality in the economy. Perhaps this implicit polarization occurs because our personal moral commitments are at stake, commitments that may run deeper than our professional identities.
While it might seem sad to undermine economic anthropology’s critical potential by “exploding” (as Browne puts it) the dichotomy of money/love, interest/affect, profit/solidarity, it is absolutely necessary to do so in order to examine how interest and affect are negotiated in the everyday. Because, as is often the case in polarized debates, critical ambition has sometimes led economic anthropology to be as unfair to the complexities of the world as the conventional economic theory it sought to correct. Emphasizing morality to the point of forgetting calculation is just as bad as doing the opposite. I am far from the first person to point this out. Several authors have used ethnography to demonstrate the culture-specific nature of the dichotomies and ideals in question. In a classic article, Parry (1989) subverts traditional dichotomies by talking about evil, dangerous ritual gifts, and good, safe commodities in India. Miller (2001a) does something similar in a European setting when he talks about calculative gift-giving and affective provisioning
6 For a detailed critique of how this notion has shaped economic anthropology see Bloch & Parry (1989),
in London. Miller shows that when buying gifts explicit calculations were made as concrete relationships were translated into gifts with an appropriate price-tag. When buying groceries, women, on the other hand, often expressed their intimate knowledge of and care for different family members by adapting their purchases to diets, tastes, needs and wants.
My ethnographic material is tricky in at least two aspects. Firstly, the emic notions of my interlocutors in this case coincide with the dichotomies and ideals I want to question. Ideals of love free from economic interests, and views of calculation as cynical, of money as cold and impersonal, and of solidarity as better than self-interest, were very much present among the people I spoke to. However, I strongly argue that much is won in the analysis if we look at exactly how and why interest and affect are negotiated rather than departing from an assumption of the “separateness and hostility” of the two. I therefore aim to focus on these everyday negotiations.
“When people participate in different economic systems at the same time”, Browne writes, (2009, p. 14) “when profound economic change is occurring, there are unusual opportunities to glimpse how those moral convictions that are anchored to economic habits get drawn into question.” I suggest that this would make Cuba, with its segmented market, dual economy and recent reforms, an ideal site to explore negotiations of economy and morality. Secondly, the critical potential and the lure of personal political and moral commitments might be especially strong when studying socialist Cuba – an example par excellence of a political and economic ”other” in a world of hegemonic capitalism. The possibilities for broad strokes and quick explanatory models are infinite and the need to “explode” yet another series of dichotomies arise. Below I will expand on anthropologist Alexei Yurchak’s critique of “binary socialism” which has informed my analysis.
Binary Socialism
Alexei Yurchak (2005) argues that much scholarly work on socialist countries has been based on problematic assumptions. In his studies of the everyday life of young adults during the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union, his explicit aim was to question these. The assumptions he chose to begin with are the following: “socialism was ‘bad’ and ‘immoral’ or had been experienced as such by Soviet people before the changes of perestroika, and, further, the collapse of Soviet socialism was predicated on this badness and
immorality” (Yurchak, 2005, p. 5). Without ever denying the presence of oppression, censure, lying, theft and informing on others, Yurchak questions the focus and insistence on these issues in the study of socialist countries:
What tends to get lost in the binary accounts is the crucial and seemingly paradoxical fact that, for great numbers of Soviet citizens, many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialist life (such as equality, community, selflessness, altruism, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future) were of genuine importance, despite the fact that many of their everyday practices routinely transgressed, reinterpreted, or refused certain norms and rules represented in the official ideology of the socialist state. (Yurchak, 2005, p. 8)
One of the dichotomies most effectively dismantled in Yurchak’s study is support/resistance. Instead of routinely reading young people’s love of Western music, clothes etc. as resistance, he looks at the complexities and contradictions in everyday life and state-citizen relations in Soviet during the 1980s. The picture that emerges is one where the Soviet state does not have the monopoly to define socialism and where “resistance” becomes too narrow and limiting when analyzing the relationship between the people and the state. An interest in foreign culture could be seen as bourgeois decadence and resistance or, quite the contrary, as the fulfillment of the communist ideal of internationalism. Obscure art groups, study-groups where young people discussed poetry and went camping, the knowledge of English and the popularity of rock were all enabled by the Soviet state. Young university students active in communist organizations discussed rock and politics and found Uriah Heap to be more representative of what socialism meant to them than was state-sponsored Soviet pop.
Just as I believe the deconstruction of the dichotomy economy/morality to be necessary in order to understand how morality is articulated in economic life, I also consider the deconstruction of the dichotomy socialism/capitalism fundamental to understanding everyday life both in Cuba and beyond. In everyday life, the relationship between solidarity and socialism is as complex as that between private profit and capitalism. Binary models like these might have a place in scholarly work as good tools to think with, but they also obstruct our understanding. It is my conviction that anthropology is particularly well suited to shrug off the use of models as methodological tools and look precisely at the complexities of everyday realities lived in specific places at specific times.
Carollee Bengelsdorf (2009) talks about a shift in the study of Cuba within the social sciences, which has gone from using “broad strokes” and talking about formal institutions (The Economy, The State and Fidel) to studies – like the present one – based on fieldwork and focusing on how people in Cuba actually live. The use of ethnographic methods and a focus on everyday life opens up for more complex studies going beyond binary accounts to attend to the “messiness” of human life everywhere. This certainly fills a void also mentioned by D. J. Fernández:
Informal social practices, the interactions among individuals in everyday life, and their political import have been neglected or rendered invisible. The resulting portrait of what constitutes the social and, by implication, the political has been rigid, inhuman, and much more “rational institutional” than what is true in the day-to-day experience of Cubans. (Fernández, 2000, pp. vii-viii)
The interest in everyday life and the use of ethnographic methods might facilitate non-binary accounts but does not automatically lead to such a position. Below I will discuss a couple of examples of studies focusing on everyday economies in Cuba, some of which reproduce, and others which challenge, notions of binary socialism.
Research in Cuba using ethnographic methods and focusing on everyday economies began with the life-histories recorded by anthropologist Oscar Lewis and his team in Havana in the early 1960s (Butterworth, 1980; Lewis, Lewis, & Rigdon, 1977a, 1977b, 1978). They deal with, among many other things, the changes in the lives and economies of poor women and men, brought about by the socialist revolution of 1959. Probably inspired by Lewis’s stay in the country, at least two life-histories of poor women in Havana were written by the Cuban ethnographers Jorge Calderón Gonzalez (Calderón González & Loy Hierro, 1970) and Aida García Alonso (García Alonso, 1968). Given the method of life-histories presented in first-person narratives, these are fascinating reads and serve as a good historical background to my research. The lack of analysis and any connection to theory-making, however, limits their reach since they give no clues as to how we can understand economic life in Cuba. The fact that Oscar Lewis himself died before the volumes were completed further limits our access to the conclusions he might have drawn from his study
Besides these initial studies, anthropologist Mona Rosendahl’s monograph about everyday life in a small town she calls Limones during the 1980s (Rosendahl, 1997) was, for a long time, the only one using ethnographic
methods and dealing with economic life. Of particular importance to the present study is Rosendahl’s chapter on reciprocity and household economy (Rosendahl, 1997, pp. 28-50). Descriptions of the rationed market and household budgets, as well as the practices of consumption, serve as historical testaments to how things worked before the economic crisis of the 1990s. The author’s analysis of reciprocity deals with aspects of everyday economies which I have analyzed in terms of morality and economy: gift-giving, hospitality, mutual help, etc. Rosendahl looks at social and economic aspects of different relationships and the significance of being able to master ongoing reciprocity in order to be seen as a good (cultured) person and maintain social relationships. Ideology is another area of inquiry which is examined both at the level of the discourse of state representatives and the many ways in which it is experienced in everyday life. What the author calls the “emic view of socialism” is teased out by analyzing how socialism coexists with other, in part contradictory, conceptions. Socialism is then, not treated as a given ideology formulated by authorities (or even assumed by the author) but as an ongoing conversation between people in a specific time and place, a conversation that sometimes contradicts itself.
A similar analysis was done by political scientist Katherine Gordy (2006) who has written about consumption in the hard currency economy and popular ideological responses to the economic changes made after the economic crisis of the 1990s. Like Rosendahl, Gordy focuses on ideology in the broad sense of the word. She reveals the complex and contradictory nature of values, expectations and ideological standpoints which defies many simplifications of socialism versus capitalism. Socialism, she argues, is not only defined in official rhetoric but in popular discourse as well, and the outcome of recent reforms cannot be put down to something as simple as socialism slowly but inevitably transitioning towards capitalism. Consumerism has no intrinsic ideological meaning, just as socialism cannot be defined conclusively. In that sense both Rosendahl’s and Gordy’s studies share many features with Yurchak (2005) and offer an alternative to binary accounts of life, and ideology, in socialist countries.
The contradictions and tensions analyzed by Gordy are often treated as new, post-1990s, phenomena resulting in a crisis of values leading people to practice a double moral standard. One scholar talking about a crisis of values, where emerging inequalities and a new neoliberal ethos conflict with “old” socialist values of solidarity and equality, is anthropologist Amy L. Porter
(2008). She begins by defining citizenship as based on the right to own7 and
explores the linkages between citizenship and consumption in contemporary Havana. She argues that most Cubans experience inequalities in their access to consumption. These inequalities are twofold; first those between foreigners and nationals where some spaces for consumption are reserved for the former; and second those between Cubans with different access to hard currency. This reality of unequal access to consumption has to do with emerging differences in society that clash with official egalitarian rhetoric. The inability to consume, concludes Porter, leads to feelings of second-hand citizenship and a crisis of values.
Kathy Powell also sees a crisis of values in contemporary Cuba. In her article on solidarity and the informal economy (Powell, 2008) the author looks at how the entrepreneurial spirit needed to succeed in this economy both rests upon and threatens solidarity. Her analysis successfully illuminates the mixed feelings surrounding the abilities necessary to succeed in the informal market and also serves to highlight the ideal of materially disinterested love where calculation and self-interest are seen as contrary to intimacy and solidarity. While I have analyzed this as everyday negotiations and “relational work”, Powell, like Porter above, analyzes this in relation to ideology and neoliberalism, talking about a crisis of values and complex resistances both to the Cuban state and to global capitalism.
Elise Andaya (2009) does something similar in her study of physicians in Havana. She analyzes their relationship with both the state and patients in terms of a gift economy permeated by reciprocity. Through a careful historical analysis of the political rhetoric surrounding medical training, the ethos of the gift emerges as central to the social status of doctor in Cuba and their position as symbols of the Revolution. In relation to the state, their training is the first gift to be reciprocated through selfless work helping others. Andaya argues that this vision of doctors as having a moral obligation to help others made gifts and favors the only possible means for patients to reciprocate. Gifts became the way to show gratitude for services performed as well as to strategically invest in valuable social relations and distinguishing themselves from other patients to secure privileged treatment. This economy of gifts and favors was permeated by a discourse of friendship and mutual help where overt expectations on reciprocity and interested calculations certainly existed but were silenced. Like Powell, Andaya sheds
7 A strange definition, I would say, in the context of a country where private property has been circumscribed
light on the negotiations around the ideal of disinterested love which she frames as threatened by the changing economic and political situation. What Porter, Powell and Andaya do is affirm Yurchak’s claim that, for many people in the Soviet Union as well as in Cuba, socialist values such as equality and selflessness were and are of great personal importance.
The crisis-of-values-narrative certainly holds more than a grain of truth. Great changes have occurred in Cuba since the fall of the Soviet Union and, more recently, with the change of leader. And as always when changes occur, people engage in negotiations to make sense of them and create a new moral community. At the same time, it is important to remember that many of the contradictions that people struggle with in contemporary Cuba have a long history, dating back to before the 1990s, and they therefore might not always be explained only as old socialist values meeting new capitalist/neoliberal ones.
According to my understanding of Yurchak’s critique, it urges us not to fall prey to our assumptions about what socialism is or how life was or is lived in countries called socialist. He effectively points at how the tale of binary socialism is an attractive one that seduces us with its simplicity and neat oppositions. Binary accounts, he says, are often made at other times or places than those analyzed. Tales about “old” socialist values are, I believe, often based on assumptions rather than on an actual analysis of Cuban policy and political rhetoric in the past.
Gordy shows how many of the contradictions (between market mechanisms and a commitment to social justice, for example) were not new to the Special Period and, further, how problematic the “straight empirical narratives” (from old socialism to new capitalism) so prevalent in texts about Cuba can be:
Indeed, Cuban socialist ideology had gone through many permutations before the 1990s even as basic principles of socioeconomic equality, inclusive nationalism, and unified leadership remained key. It was not as if there existed a clear and unchanging definition of Cuban socialist ideology that was forced for the first time to adjust to historical conditions.
The severity of the economic freefall in the 1990s did, however, bring these long-standing tensions into high relief. At the same time, the straight empirical narrative of this freefall threatened not just to erase Cuban history before 1991 but also to obscure the fact that while the crisis may have limited Cuba’s choices, it did not do away with them completely, particularly at the level of ideology. (Gordy, 2006, p. 391)
As mentioned briefly earlier, I have instead chosen to talk about negotiations of solidarity versus maximization (for example in the realm of gift-giving) as “relational work” which is performed not only when there is a “crisis of values” but in all societies where there is an ideal of love as separate from material interests. In this way, the everyday economies of contemporary people in Havana are lifted from the question of socialism versus capitalism to a question which transcends such divisions. I see this not as a better option than the one chosen by the above authors but as a different one that can add to our understanding and provide new insights.
Since Rosendahl’s study (1997), the only published anthropological monograph focusing on economic life in Cuba is Amelia Weinreb Rosenberg’s book about daily life among what she calls “unsatisfied citizen-consumers” in Havana (Weinreb Rosenberg, 2009). It deals with issues of consumption, income-generating activities and social stratification, thus paralleling the present study in respect to several of the themes dealt with. Weinreb Rosenberg, however, explicitly distances herself from Yurchak’s critique, which, the author argues (Weinreb Rosenberg, 2009, pp. 33-34), might be appealing intellectually and after socialism has vanished. However, in practice, she argues, the dichotomies must be used to understand contemporary Cuba. The result of her position is, for example, a vision of migration and informal income-generating activities as popular resistance against the state. When encountering an “Afro-Cuban” household that “initially appears state-faithful and peso-poor” (Weinreb Rosenberg, 2009, p. 113) she is surprised to find a mix of state employment and informal work, of transnational love-affairs and relative wealth. She interprets all these things as resistance which should not be present in a household she has labeled “state-faithful”. Instead of permitting this surprise to deconstruct her pre-suppositions, the author argues that these contradictions must be a sign of the “doble moral” (double moral standard) which characterizes contemporary Cubans (Weinreb Rosenberg, 2009, p. 113)8. The title itself, Cuba in the
Shadow of Change: Daily Life in the Twilight of the Revolution presents a “straight empirical narrative” where the shadows of change grow longer as the “old” socialist sun is setting and Cuba waits for the “new” capitalist sunrise.
8 According to Yurchak (2005, pp. 16-18) this points at another binary model which is common in studies of
life in socialist countries - that between a static and unitary ‘true’ inner core in people which they can ‘hide’ or ‘reveal’ and which can come into conflict with practice.
While Weinreb Rosenberg’s analysis certainly captures part of a complex reality, I have, as already mentioned, chosen to illuminate another part portraying everyday life as rather ordinary, devoid of socialist exotica in ironic contradiction with capitalist modernity but full of moral negotiations dealing less with socialism/capitalism and more with emic notions of right and wrong. This does not make the negotiations less political but it does make them impossible to fit into a pre-cut mold of how socialist or capitalist subjectivities are assumed to think and behave. In refraining from making easy, politicized readings of everyday life in Cuba, I try to re-politicize a higher level of analysis where binary accounts (of socialism/capitalism, economy/morality and development/poverty) would have us believe the world to be far simpler than it is, with far less political options than there are. Since part of the problem is, as mentioned above, that much is being written outside of or after socialism, I have made a point of including research by Cuban scholars in my study. Even though, to my knowledge, no Cuban scholars interested in everyday economies use ethnographic methods (other than, in some cases, interviews) there are several interesting and highly relevant studies. A large body of work deals with changes brought about by the crisis – mostly in the area of demography and family (Álvarez Suárez, 2004; Chávez Negrín, 2000; Díaz Tenorio, 2000), and in terms of new social, gender, and racial inequalities (Añé Aguiloche, 2005; M. Espina Prieto, 2003, 2004, 2006; M. Espina Prieto et al., 2005; R. Espina Prieto & Rodríguez Ruiz, 2006; Pérez Izquierdo, 2003a, 2003b). An interesting study based on interviews with private entrepreneurs is provided by Victoria Pérez Izquierdo, Fabien Oberto Calderón and Mayelín González Rodriguez (2004). Viviana Togores and Anicia García (2004) have written about the segmented market for daily consumption and the dual economy of two currencies, while María del Carmen Zabala Argüelles (2008, 2010a, 2010b) has published extensively on poverty in Cuba.
Fieldwork
The bulk of the ethnographic material on which this dissertation is based was gathered over a period of eight months in 2006 and a return visit of one month in 2008. Prior to that, I had lived in Havana as a university student on two different occasions for a total of eighteen months9. During this time I was
enrolled as an Art History student in a group consisting mostly of Cubans. Since I am married to a Cuban man, I also became part of a Cuban family as
an in-law – something I will have reason to come back to later. Since my stipend as a student did not allow me to live in the hostel reserved for exchange students, I always lived under “informal” arrangements at the peoples’ homes: sometimes renting a room in an apartment and other times living with my mother-in-law.
During this time my personal background helped me to gain a foothold in Cuban society; my parents are from Spain, and more precisely from the Canary Islands. Besides speaking fluent Spanish in a dialect very similar to the Cuban one and having a Hispanic name, I also had shared “roots” with many Cubans who are descendants of migrants from the Canary Islands. N. T. Fernandez (2010, pp. 9-10) writes about being of Spanish descent as a good middle ground: one is neither as foreign as other foreigners nor as complicated as being a Cuban living abroad10 (see also Alcázar Campos,
2010, pp. 97-99).
My knowledge of the field – gained during previous stays – gave me a solid base on which to conduct fieldwork. I not only knew the local version of Spanish and the practicalities of living in Havana, but I was also part of a social network, sharing a five year long history with some people. Having a general knowledge of the field also allowed me to ask informed questions and, importantly, to know when and to whom they could be posed. For the comparatively short period of nine months I was, in other words, able to conduct intensive fieldwork.
Being part of a family shaped my material status in several ways. On the more negative side it limited my scope as it made it impossible to be “neutral” in the social networks in which my family moved. It meant, for example, that it was assumed that I would take their side in conflicts arising between neighbors, making fieldwork in the neighborhoods where they lived complicated. Most of the potentially negative consequences of being part of a family in the field, such as the time consuming task of fulfilling obligations, were, however, avoided by establishing a separate place of residence. During most of my fieldwork I therefore chose to live with friends instead of with in-laws.
10 Cuba’s post-1959 history of migration is fraught with complicated emotions. Migration was politicized for a
long time, and leaving the country was seen as desertion. Contact between many of those who left and those who stayed was made virtually impossible, breaking up many families. This has changed for the better but the issue is still saturated with politics and deep emotions.
On a more positive note, the experience of being part of a Cuban family has of course enriched my knowledge of life in Havana and created an area of shared experience and complicity with the people I talked to. Sharing information about family life, especially the negative sides of it, with outsiders is morally questionable in Cuba. Being able to share in return, or make references to personal experiences, created a space where sensitive issues could be dealt with without feelings of disloyalty. My own feelings of disloyalty and my sense of privacy have been difficult to deal with. I have tried, but not really succeeded, to exclude my family from the following pages. At some points they are mentioned and at some others they are disguised behind a fictive name for the sake of privacy and security.
Writing about everyday economies often prompts questions about my interlocutor’s “social class”. The question is tricky and many aspects of it will be dealt with in detail in subsequent chapters. First and foremost I contacted people through personal connections. My interlocutors are, in other words, those whom I knew or got to know that wanted to participate in the study.
All of my contacts lived in Havana. Most lived in barrios close to the center of town, while others lived further out. Some barrios, such as Vedado, were considered “nice” while others, such as Alamar and Guanabacoa, had a bad reputation. All lived in apartments or very small houses and, as is the norm in Cuba, they owned11 their living quarters. Only a handful rented informally.
When looking at the education level, there were PhDs as well as those who had never finished compulsory schooling and everything in between. Some had travelled extensively, while others had never left Havana. They lived in all kinds of households: alone, in nuclear households or in extended three-generation households. In terms of personal characteristics, I made no conscious selection based on gender or age but given my own gender and age there is a certain over-representation of women and people in their twenties as well as middle-aged women - the mothers of my friends.
I did not collect data on their self-identification in terms of skin-color or “race” and it was not something that emerged as being important during interviews and conversations. At the same time however, as will be dealt with in subsequent chapters, several studies of race and racial inequalities in Cuba
11 In 2006, ‘ownership’ of a dwelling meant having a legal document for the property, enabling you to leave it
as inheritance and giving you the right to swap it for some other dwelling. It did not include the right to sell. For more about housing and ownership see Coyula & Hamberg (2003).
make it clear that race certainly has an impact when it comes to everyday economies and specifically when it comes to class and social stratification. In relation to my firsthand ethnographic material, I have highlighted other aspects which, together with ‘race’, gender and geography make up social stratification: education, income-generating activities, currency etc.
Continuing the description of my interlocutors, there were atheists as well as proselytizing Christians; those loyal to the Party as well as those openly against everything having to do with the government. Most, of course, occupied some middle ground. Here my general knowledge of the field helped me see the relevance of politics as well as religion in the views expressed by some people, in the decisions they made and the actions they took.
The way they made a living is as much an empirical question for this dissertation to straighten out as it is a necessary part of introducing the people it deals with. To make a long story short, three income-generating activities feature as the prominent ones: formal salaried work for the state, informal salaried work for a private entrepreneur, and informal entrepreneurship. This meant that the people that feature in this study had comparatively low economic capital. They lacked large stable remittances and had no formalized private businesses operating in hard currency – the two strategies potentially leading to a high income. A few of those earning a state salary had bonuses paid out in hard currency but these were mostly low, around 10 CUC. None occupied a high position within the political hierarchy or the emerging business economy and none worked in the tourist industry. They all earned the bulk of their income in soft currency. To summarize, they could be said to have a low to moderate level of economic capital but very varied levels of cultural capital and personal characteristics. Chapter three will take a closer look at their own evaluations of their living standard. Like most other people in the world, they saw themselves as “normal people” and thus “ordinary Cubans”.
The principal method used during fieldwork was participant observation recorded in extensive field notes. I spent time with people, participated in conversations, asked and answered questions, eaves-dropped, watched television, socialized, helped with child-care or grocery-shopping, moved about the city, went to concerts. I also took care of my housework, not paying anyone else to do so; I cooked, cleaned, bought provisions, washed, shared gossip on where to find tooth brushes or yoghurt. In order to gather more
systematic data I devised a form to collect information on household budgets (see Appendix 2). These were distributed to twenty households of which fifteen returned them after two or four weeks. Based on the information in each form, an interview focused on issues regarding the household economy was conducted. In order to reach new households and avoid ethical complications I asked one of my friends, Miguel, to help me with this part of the research as a field-assistant. While this turned out to be a good way of generating data, it only represents a very small part of the material gathered and the fifteen households participating in this part of the research are only a fraction of the people I spoke to.
It is important to note that I never used any recording device. This means that all quotations are taken from my notes of what I remembered people to have said. More detailed notes were taken during interviews while certain observations and quotations were scribbled in my agenda during the day. These were, as soon as possible, written out from memory to my field diary or in interview transcripts. Quotes are, therefore, never verbatim.
In a controlled society like Cuba, questions of security for me and my interlocutors were always very present both during fieldwork and writing. All material was kept on encrypted, secured hard drives and real names were never used. Physical notes were destroyed. In the text I have taken care not to leave any possibility that might permit the identification of my contacts. Neither I, nor, to my knowledge, the people I conducted fieldwork among were ever subjected to any investigations or controls.
Outline of the thesis
This introduction is followed by a background chapter with a brief historical overview and more detailed descriptions of the history and current shape of the market for labor as well as consumer goods, of the issue of inequality and equality, and of families and households in Havana.
Then follows chapter three, which talks about living standard and which deals with experiences of economic stress, as well as how people evaluated their economic situation in life. As will become apparent, these evaluations can never be neutral descriptions but are always done in a cultural and political context. Importantly, they did not conform to conventional tales of poverty and deprivation but served to construct morality and personhood.
Chapter four is about consumption. Here I will return to the market for consumer goods introduced in chapter two. This time however I will pay attention to the ways in which the people I spoke to, as consumers, negotiated rights and obligations towards the state in state markets as well as towards each other in the informal (or black) market. I will also show how difference and distinction was created in the dual economy.
The issue of income-generating activities will be dealt with in chapter five. Here the focus lies on state employment, informal employment in the private sector, and private informal entrepreneurship. Of particularly importance here is how these different activities are used, combined, compared and viewed. State employment emerge as an asset that can potentially generate much more than a salary. Central to my analysis are the moral negotiations in which people engage in order to find ways to make a living that are “good” – in every sense of the word: that generate enough income, that make use of skills and that do not come into conflict with their moral convictions.
In chapter six, the notion of interest and affect (or money and love) as separate and opposing is deconstructed by looking at exchanges and transactions in intimate relationships. By looking at how men’s assets are mobilized by women (mothers and wives/girlfriends) I show how interest and affect are dealt with in terms of rights and obligations in kinship relations. When looking at the relationships between health personnel and their patients, or that between friends or recently dating couples, however, we will see that issues of intention become crucial and an ideal of disinterestedness is presented.
Chapter seven offers some conclusions and focuses on how morality is articulated in everyday economic life.
2
Setting the Scene
Elena
I only met Elena once. Marta, a friend of mine, told me she knew a person who wanted to participate in my study so I asked her to set a date for an interview.
As we approached the house on the outskirts of Havana where Elena and her elderly mother live, Marta points quickly at it and whispers: “There it is. Do you see the state it is in? It is practically falling down on them! Poor things…only this week several pieces of concrete have fallen down from the ceiling.” High up near the ceiling big cracks run across the concrete walls and the roof above the little front porch looks as if it is going to fall down any minute. It seems, however, that the house was very nice when first built – maybe sometime during the 1940s or 1950s. It is a medium size, one-story house surrounded by a small but very lush garden. We enter the small gate and, instead of approaching the front door, we walk around the side of the house to a patio at the back. The patio is full of beautiful potted plants and Elena, a woman in her forties, is washing clothes in a sink.
She turns around when we enter the patio and excuses herself while drying her hands on a cloth. We introduce ourselves and she invites us to sit down on some metal chairs while she goes inside to get us glasses of ice-cold water. After some small talk, Marta announces that she has some errands to run, leaving Miguel and I to conduct the interview.
Elena tells me the house she lives in used to belong to her elderly mother, but now that her mother is over eighty years old, Elena and her siblings agreed to put it in Elena’s name. Her mother requires continuous care since she has severe ulcers on her legs, and as Elena is the one caring for he it is considered only right that she inherit the house.
On several occasions during the interview Elena mentions the state of the house as one of her biggest problems. She would like to swap it for something
smaller and in better shape but claims that her mother won’t even talk about it. Fixing it would mean a lot of work and money – money that Elena does not have. She explains that, because it was constructed with sea sand, the roof is cracking and will have to be replaced completely. This is, in fact, what Elena mentions when asked about her wishes for the future: “What I would like is to secure a roof12 and some sort of commodity for my old age.”
Elena has been working as a clinical laboratory technician for twenty years. She works from 7am to 3pm Monday to Friday in addition to two to three nightshifts a week, and one weekend per month. Her monthly salary is 360 MN and, apart from occasional gifts from her husband – who stays with her intermittently – she has no other monetary income. Together with her mother’s pension the household has a stable monthly income of 524 MN. The month she participated in my study her husband gave her 15 CUC, a far from insignificant sum which amounts to Elena’s whole monthly salary13.
I ask Elena whether she receives any benefits as a worker in public health. None, she replies: “There have been moments when they have talked about implementing some sort of stimuli and we get all excited but in the end there is nothing. But, how shall I put it… Cubans try to have friends. One tries to get along well with people and to help each other out. I, for example, try to maintain friendship with the nurses in sterilization so that they’ll help me get hold of bandages for my mother’s legs.” Elena also mentions that she receives presents from patients wanting her to take extra care with, and give priority to, their samples in the hospital laboratory. In the past month she received lunches, bars of soap, and panties14 – all of them attractive CUC-goods.
Even though her low salary and lack of material incentives are big problems for Elena she has other motivations for staying in her job. She likes it and finds it fun and important: “We work for the love of it, as they say, and that is why I have continued.” She takes great pride in her job and in being a working woman.
12 The word techo, roof, is often used in Havana as a synecdoche meaning housing. In this case the word takes
on a double meaning since it is the state of the actual roof that is threatening Elena’s housing.
13 The per capita income for that month was 442 MN.
14 For more about the practice of giving gifts to health workers see chapter five and six as well as Andaya
(2009). Since they are only sold in CUC and highly necessary, underwear is, in my experience, a common gift to health workers – despite the implications such a gift can have in, for example, Europe. Again, Andaya (2009, p. 361) can be consulted for another example of underwear as a ‘normal’ gift to a physician.
Elena does not label herself as poor but she says that she does feel economic insecurity from time to time. When asked to evaluate her current situation in life the answer is rather negative: “Ay m’ija! There are days when one feels very depressed. There are times that are better off and other times that are tighter. But we are surviving. I suppose that in lots of your interviews you find people that are depressed solely because of the situation we [Cubans] are going through…”
Pedro and Maybel
When I saw Pedro and Maybel again during my fieldwork in 2006 it had been little more than three years since we had last met. At that time both were studying at the university and only a couple of weeks before I left they had told me that Maybel was pregnant. I remember that Pedro’s constant complaints about having to live at his mother’s apartment intensified with the good news…
In 2006, their daughter Cornelia was already two and a half years old, went to day-care, and liked to watch cartoons. Maybel, in her mid-twenties, had just returned to her studies after two years of maternity leave, while Pedro, in his mid-thirties, had dropped out definitively to work as a freelance designer. He had also inherited his grandmother’s apartment in Western Havana where they now lived.
The second part of my fieldwork that year coincided with the end of the summer holidays so Maybel was often at home during the days, while Pedro was out on errands related to his design projects. I used to arrive around midday while Maybel was watching TV-series from Europe or the US which, along with movies and music, were widely pirated from hard disk to hard disk among computer-owners in Havana. Normally we just sat, chatting the morning away, until it was time to collect little Cornelia from the day-care center a few blocks away, and Maybel had to start with the household chores. Sometimes Maybel’s mother or brother were there visiting. Pedro’s mother, who lived in the same block, also dropped by from time to time, announcing the subsidized items that had arrived at the store or asking whether they were out of coffee. The conversations moved easily from fashion and soap operas to philosophy and the sufferings during the economic crisis of the 1990s. Pedro and Maybel were doing well. They had a computer and a DVD-player and their daughter had toys, clothes, shoes and plenty of food – even red
meat. Maybel studied and her only income was the monthly scholarship of 60 MN for university students with children. Pedro had a very irregular income based on projects he participated in as a designer. One month he could earn much more than the average Cuban worker and be paid in CUC, while the next two months he could be without any income whatsoever. Their household economy was instead completely based on leasing out a car and a telephone extension.
Pedro’s father worked for the government and was given a car – an old Moscovich. Since he was on a long assignment abroad at the time, he had given permission for Pedro to rent the car to an acquaintance for 90 CUC per month. They had also provided a neighbor with an extension of their phone for which they charged 10 CUC per month. These 100 CUC were the bulk of their household economy15, a very big income when compared with that of many other families in Havana. Leasing out material assets like this is, of course, illegal and they risk fines and confiscations. Since leasing out a car and a phone extension is by no means time-consuming, it not only gave them the money but also the time to dedicate themselves to things that really interested them – university studies and freelance design work – without worrying too much about these being rather unprofitable activities. For young parents – I would say – this is a rare luxury anywhere in the world.
***
The stories of Elena, and Pedro and Maybel, set the scene for this study. The picture that emerges is complex: there is soft as well as hard currency, the leasing out of a telephone line and an old car amounting to almost seven times the salary of a laboratory technician, houses are swapped instead of sold, university studies are free of charge, day-care is cheap, and health personnel considers friends in important places to be a work benefit, along with their salary.
This chapter provides the necessary background to begin understanding all these complexities. I will start with a brief historical outline and then move on to look more closely at the history and contemporary situation of the segmented market for everyday consumption as well as labor, the situation of equality and inequality, and finally, families and households.
Historical Overview
16As the biggest island of the Antilles and with a strategic position as a first port and “the key to the New World” Cuba’s colonial history has been shaped by European interests. Spanish colonialism, beginning in 1492, all but eradicated the Ciboney and Arawak inhabitants through warfare, the introduction of new diseases, and slavery. Attacking Cuba became part of challenging the Spanish control of the New World, and France, the Netherlands, and Britain, all tried to occupy the island at various points in time.
The British occupation starting 1762 was short, less than a year, but had particularly profound implications. Amongst other things, it meant the start of large-scale slave trade to Cuba from Africa and the liberalization of trade. Both of these changes led to the consolidation of Cuba as a plantation-economy specializing in sugar and tobacco, once the island had returned to Spanish control.
The first war seeking independence from Spain was fought between 1868 and 1878 and failed. The years that followed were marked by a gradual abolition of slavery and an economic depression as beet sugar replaced cane sugar on the European market. Cuba grew increasingly dependent on the United States as one of the few buyers of cane sugar and as a growing foreign investor. The second war of independence was fought between 1895 and 1898. In the last year of the war, the United States intervened on behalf of the Cubans. Independence from Spain was immediately followed by a US military occupation beginning in 1899 and ending in 1902, with the acceptance of the Platt Amendment which consolidated US control over Cuba. The establishment of a US military base at Guantánamo, and the right to intervene to maintain an “adequate” government, were both parts of this amendment17.
While “independence” meant that the US consolidated their influence in Cuban politics, economy and culture, this influence was not entirely new. There had already been considerable flows of people, goods, and money between the two countries decades before, and these intensified now. Many Americans bought land and founded companies in Cuba. Members from the Cuban upper classes sent their children to study in the US. American tourism
16 This section is largely based on Pérez (2006) and Gott (2004).
to Cuba boomed during abolition, and many working-class Cubans migrated to the US to work for a few years and earn money to build houses or start businesses in Cuba. Havana was a modern city, but also a city with huge class disparities and sharp divisions between whites and “people of color”. In 1933, there was a civil-military coup against president Machado who had decided to remain in power even after his mandate ended. The experimental government that took power under Machado was the first one without US sanction and only remained in power for 100 days. During these days, women obtained the right to vote, land tenure was reformed, and worker’s rights were expanded. However, tensions between civilians and the army grew, and in 1934, Fulgencio Batista, who was the head of the army, was backed by the US in forcing a change of government. After an initial period of revolutionary resistance and violent repression, economic and political stability was achieved. Even though Batista did not formally become president until 1940, when he was elected he effectively ruled the country through “puppet presidents and shadow governments” (Pérez, 2006, p. 211). In 1944 Batista failed to be re-elected, and two consecutive presidents continued Cuba’s version of rather violent and corrupt democracy.
In 1952, Batista returned from the US where he had been living since losing the elections and promptly seized power by a swift military coup. The elections held in 1954 were boycotted by all other candidates and Batista, unsurprisingly, won. Economically these were hard times in Cuba with a high level of inflation, extended poverty, and organized crime. Living conditions were hard, both for workers and the middle-class. Revolutionary resistance was as insistent as state repression and included both urban movements and guerillas in the countryside. The 26th of July Movement headed by Fidel
Castro, which fought in the mountains of Sierra Maestra became the leading group in the anti-Batista struggle. Besides wanting to overthrow Batista the 26th of July movement was nationalist and anti-imperialist, seeking true
independence and autonomy. It was also inspired by humanist visions of social justice, especially the writings of Cuban intellectual José Martí. Resistance grew and Batista eventually lost even US support. In Cuban historiography it is said that the Revolution triumphed on January 1st 1959.
Cuban scholars talk about the Revolution with a capital R, not as an isolated historical event, but as an ongoing process starting in 1959 and continuing to this day.
Pérez (2006, p. 242) estimates that 1500 decrees, laws, and edicts were enacted in the first nine months of 1959, and many more soon followed. Land reform, efforts to improve literacy, free education and health care, nationalization of foreign-owned companies, the list goes on and on. In Havana, some of the most notable reforms were those related to housing (see Coyula & Hamberg, 2003, pp. 18-19). Only a couple of months after the revolution, evictions were stopped and rents were dramatically lowered. Over time people either became owners of their homes or permanent leaseholders. According to Coyula & Hamberg (2003, p. 18): “By the late 1990s, more than 85% of Cuban households are homeowners, paying little or nothing for their units except for maintenance, repair and utilities.” When moving into newly constructed housing, tenants paid initial installments to the state and were then in possession of their living quarters but without the right to sell them as there is no housing market18. Housing was, at the time of fieldwork,
instead swapped, inherited, or given by the state. Besides those related to housing, initial reforms also included a lowering of telephone and utility bills, rationing and subsidizing of food, as well as rises in wages, and a policy of full employment. Private beaches and clubs were opened to the public and racial segregation was eliminated.
US-Cuban relations deteriorated as US property was nationalized and new trading partners were sought in the Soviet Bloc. In 1961, the Revolution was proclaimed socialist and ties with communist countries in Eastern Europe grew stronger. The US imposed an embargo, making Cuba highly dependent on trade with, and support from, the Soviet Bloc. PCC, the Cuban Communist Party, became the only party; freedom of speech was restricted and all media became state media.
While many saw their living conditions ameliorating with the Revolution, others lost their property and could not find a new life within the emerging society. Emigration, especially to the US and Miami, was high, and Cuban exiles organized resistance from abroad. But foreign, as well as internal resistance, was met with repression and has, to this day, failed.
Economic dependency on the Soviet Union meant that, when it disintegrated in 1989, the Cuban economy was hit very hard. The resulting economic crisis is called período especial en tiempo de paz, Special Period in Times of Peace, or just período especial, Special Period. While previous generations of Cubans talked about their lives in terms of before and after the Revolution,
the middle-aged people I talked to spoke in terms of before and after the Special Period. Beginning in 1991 and peaking in 1994, this was a time characterized by severe and widespread shortages. Clothes, hygienic products, electricity, transportation, shoes, water, medicine, paper and, above all, food, were scarce.
Reforms were implemented in order to deal with the crisis. Joint ventures were permitted, state farms were converted to cooperatives, the holding of hard currency was legalized, and private micro enterprises were permitted, to only name a few. Towards the end of the decade, the Special Period was over.
It is in this post-Special Period Cuba that the present study is situated. In 2006, Fidel Castro was still in power, the PCC was the only party, freedom of speech was restricted, there were two currencies, media was state controlled, the US embargo was in place, the state was virtually the only employer and Chinese buses made public transportation better than it had been in many years.
With this brief historical overview as a backdrop, and in order to create a background for the rest of the study, I will now turn to the history of the segmented market. This will allow us to look more closely at the parts of the post-1959 history of Cuba which are most relevant to the present study.
The Segmented Market
The development of the segmented market19 provides a good background to
the present research. On the one hand, the segmented market works as the objective framework within which the practices and negotiations dealt with in the study are carried out. It is, for example, in order to have access to the segmented market that income-generation activities are devised. On the other hand, the segmented market in 2006 was the direct product of local, as well as global, political and economic processes. In explaining the how and why of this market, the modern history of Cuba and its relation to the rest of the world can be effectively traced.
As seen in the table below, one can talk about seven different markets for consumer goods in Havana in 2006. All, with the exception of number six
19 I use the word market in its broad meaning referring to situations and relations of trade. When referring to
